I first met Orson Scott Card when I was working as a bag boy at a grocery store in Greensboro, North Carolina. By then I had already read Ender’s Game several times as well as its first sequel, Speaker for the Dead. Card was a genial, pleasant, and generous man, often tipping me well above the going rate of a dollar a bag for carrying his groceries to his car (yes, we still did that type of thing in the late 1980s).

I was awestruck that the man who wrote my favorite novel was a real flesh-and-blood person whom I could talk to. He not only wrote stories I could relate to, but set some of those same stories in locales I actually knew and regularly visited. I could easily imagine that the elementary school Ender went to was my own, and the lake where Ender spent one summer back on Earth was literally a lake I had been to and water-skied on several times outside of Greensboro.

I had been immensely moved and affected by both novels, but in very different ways. Whereas Ender’s Game appealed to my feelings of isolation and remoteness from my peers, Speaker for the Dead helped me develop my own sense of understanding for how those who appear alien to us are simply following their own path. It is no understatement that these two books, along with a few others, helped form who I am today.